For a GameBus experiment related to the Eindhoven Marathon 2019, we included a very basic stress logging feature to GameBus.
As the background materials, we had considered a report by NYSUT Social Services. Essentially, we were looking for a simple holistic measure focussing on a self-assessed stress-level. About that, we found that one of the items from the so-called “Perceived Stress Scale” (PSS), is formulated as follows: “In the last month, how often have you felt nervous and stressed?”
We decided to include that item in our GameBus support, but then with a simple -2,-1,0,+1,+1,+2 scale where -2 was representing the negative situation and +2 the positive one.
We then considered that it could be valuable to also include some questions regarding (1) coping with stress and (2) emotional consequences of stress. From the PSS, we therefore selected also:
- In the last month, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?
- In the last month, how often have you been angered because of things that happened that were outside of your control?
Again, we decided to use the 5-level Likert scale for the sake of simplicity. Furthermore, we reframed all three questions to the level of one week. We therefore ended up with:
- In the last week, how often have you felt nervous and stressed?
- In the last week, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?
- In the last week, how often have you been angered because of things that happened that were outside of your control?
The scale for all these questions was then:
- very often: -2
- fairly often: -1
- sometimes: 0:
- almost never: +1
- never: +2
In retrospect, it seems arguably better to reframe “fairly often” etc. to specific numbers (e.g., “less than two times”) but we decided to stay close to what the psychology research scales prescribed.